First born do better at school

Younger children do less well in terms of overall educational attainment than their older brothers and sisters, new research reveals today.

A first child is typically at least a year ahead of a third-born brother or sister at the equivalent stage at school, it shows. At the same time, it suggests that parents with limited financial resources may invest more time and money in the education of their eldest child.

The findings are claimed to represent the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of family composition on educational achievement. They will influence the long-running debate about why first-born children are typically more successful than their younger siblings.

The research was carried out by Kjell Salvanes of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and will be presented today to the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society, hosted by University College London.

Working with colleagues at UCLA in the US, he analysed the entire population of Norway aged 16-74, between the years 1986 and 2000.

The study found that, regardless of family size or income, the difference in educational achievement is equivalent on average to the first child gaining an extra year of schooling compared with the third child.

Previous studies have suggested that children from larger families do not reach the same level of academic achievement as those from smaller families. But the researchers found when birth order was included there was no correlation with family size.

To verify the results, Professor Salvanes and his team followed the children through to adulthood and examined their earnings, full-time employment status and whether the individual had become a teenage parent. Again, they found the effect of family size was negligible.

But the impact of birth order was more pronounced in females in later life. Younger female children were found to earn less money, be less likely to work full-time and more likely to become teenage mothers.

Prof Salvanes said: "There's extensive theoretical literature that suggests there is a trade-off between child quantity and quality within a family. Our analysis has overcome the limitations of previous studies, which didn't use large data sets or considered outcomes of economic interest such as education and earnings.

"There's a lot of psychological literature on why first-born children are most successful. The main suggestion is that the eldest child acts as a teacher for the younger children and learns how to organise information and present it to others. But there could, of course, be different types of expectation from the parents and if resources are limited the parents may invest more time and money in the eldest child."

In the UK, no major studies are understood to have been carried out into the impact of family composition on academic attainment, although researchers have looked in depth at the effect of birth date and the readiness of children born later in the academic year for full-time school - and the extent to which they may be at an educational disadvantage throughout their school careers.

In the Norwegian study, the researchers used a unique data set collated using Norway's personal identity number system, which allowed them to look across families and within families to distinguish the causal effect of family size on youngsters' education.

Children studied were at least 25 in 2000, to ensure that all had completed their education.